


Nothing Small

by PastelClark



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: ....More or Less, Aftermath of Torture, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Relationships, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Childhood Trauma, Developing Friendships, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Lysithea has a backstory worthy of a main character and it's about time someone capitalized on that, Lysithea-focused, Mercy Killing, Multi, Oracle!Lysithea kinda but like a really unreliable one, Survivor Guilt, Team as Family, Torture, and by someone i mean me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-10-30 04:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20808854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelClark/pseuds/PastelClark
Summary: The first memories Lysithea has are of pain, and of rules.Do not talk back when the people in dark robes, with their strange masks and bright eyes, call for you. When they touch you, stand very still. Bite your tongue when they take your wrist, twist your arm, and push something dark and pulsing and foreign into your veins. Do not show your fear, and do not show your hurt. Use your magic only when asked, and only as they see fit.Keep the other children in line, make sure they do the same. Behaving is the surest way to surviving another day.This is what it means to grow up an Ordelia.(Or, in which Lysithea von Ordelia goes through hell, stumbles out the other side, charges into a war, and enacts a little revenge—and, somewhere along the line, accidentally builds herself a family.)





	1. The Girl From the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> _You got big plans and you gotta move_
> 
> _And I don't feel nothing at all_
> 
> _And you can't feel nothing small_
> 
> _Honey, I love you, that's all she wrote_
> 
> -[Ophelia, The Lumineers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erpltm876MA)
> 
> **Opening trigger warnings:**
> 
> -Child death  
-Mentions and allusions to torture  
-Medical experimentation on a human being  
-Mercy killing

Lysithea von Ordelia knows a secret about death.

She learns it young—far too young. She learns it in sweat and tears, boiling burns and puss-crusted wounds, fury and anguish and the taste of iron in her mouth, staining her lips and teeth. She learns it against her will, and against nature itself.

She learns it, and it is the first thing that she understands, intuitively, is not something she can hope to teach others. It is the kind of secret you can only understand when you experience it for yourself.

And for her, it has come buried in her blood, engraved on her bones, seared on her soul. She cannot escape it, even if she wanted to.

But that’s how death works, after all. It takes and takes and takes—and that may not be a secret, but it’s a hard-learned lesson all the same.

—

The first memories Lysithea has are of pain, and of rules.

Do not talk back when the people in dark robes, with their strange masks and bright eyes, call for you. When they touch you, stand very still. Bite your tongue when they take your wrist, twist your arm, and push something dark and pulsing and foreign into your veins. Do not show your fear, and do not show your hurt. Use your magic only when asked, and only as they see fit.

Keep the other children in line, make sure they do the same. Behaving is the surest way to surviving another day.

Never tell the dark-robed ones about any strange dreams you have. Any whispers in your ears, or any faint figures behind your eyes. (This last one is not one of the dark-robes’ rules. It is one Lysithea makes up for herself.)

This is what it means to grow up an Ordelia. At the ages other noble children are being taught to ride horses, to pour tea, to understand their societal duties and etiquette (All things outside Lysithea’s world. All things she will have to rush to teach herself years later, after the dark-robes finally give up and leave her and her parents to their house of ghosts), Lysithea learns her own lessons—her own code.

She learns how to wind bandages tightly, but not too much so, around limbs. She learns the right way to gently nudge the others and position herself in sleep, so that if they have an episode in the night they will not choke on their own blood.

She learns there is no difference between nobles and commoners, not really. Not when she, and her siblings, and her cousins, and the servants’ children (because when they took the children of House Ordelia they truly took _all_ of them) line up the same way, cry the same way, die the same way. Noble blood spills exactly like that of a commoner’s, and cleans up just the same, at the end of the day.

Their noble lineage buys them nothing—not a respite, not a hope, and not even extra time. The last ones left had been her and two of the cook’s children. Her siblings and cousins were long gone by then. Their natural affinity for Crests could not save them.

Those other children, her fellow prisoners, are the closest thing she has to companions, to friends. She understands very little about family, about bloodlines and inheritance and biological relation. Who is sibling and who is servant does not matter, when held in the dark-robes’ cold embrace.

They are all her responsibility. She is one of the oldest, and certainly one of the strongest. When the dark-robes come for them, she’s one of the few who doesn’t cry, she’s one of the few who can remain on her feet. She must protect them all.

She knows a small something about parents. She is allowed to see them sometimes, in the early years, when the dark-robes deem it appropriate. But only sometimes.

Her first memory of her mother is mostly of being pulled away from her, during one of their short visits. Her mother’s wailing, her reaching hands, her plaintive cries. She thinks she reached back—in one of those few, blurry moments in her early days before she learned to lock away her tears and her fear, and to feel as little as possible.

She remembers the fuzzy outline of her mother. Warm hands and a soft smile and blonde hair, maybe.

Maybe Lysithea’s hair was blonde back then, too. It’s hard to be sure.

—

When Lysithea is six, she changes the nature of the game she and the dark-robes play. She changes it for all of them, and years later she’ll look back and wonder if it was her fault, after all, that the others died. That the dark-robes pushed them all that far, until they broke.

She’s the one who gave them hope, after all.

She is six, and she is wobbly on her feet, shaking from the chill and from exhaustion. Her limbs feel sluggish and slow, and she can’t focus on the words of the dark-robes, or the faint outline of the glass they hold out to her.

She’s supposed to shatter it, she thinks. She’s supposed to use her magic—use the things in her blood they’ve been trying so hard to give her.

But the room is cold and so is Lysithea and she can barely feel her fingers and she just _can’t_. She can’t.

The dark-robes place the glass down on a table, they mutter among themselves. Even hidden behind their masks, Lysithea shivers at the way their frowns shape the air.

They call for another child—her cousin, the littlest one. They will try again.

They lead the boy in, a fist tight around his arm. His face is tearful, fearful. He’s smaller than Lysithea, so much smaller, and she can’t remember his name, because most days she barely remembers her own, but he has brown hair and doe-eyes and a cut on his lip and he’s _afraid_.

Lysithea stumbles, and croaks a refusal. She can do it. They don’t need him. They don’t _need_ him.

They ignore her. One of them goes to coax her out of the room—or drag her, if they must, it makes no difference—and another brings the boy closer, a vial of the sludge they just poured into Lysithea’s veins in hand. Her cousin quakes, and he looks back at her, and she can taste his terror.

Her body is like ice, stiff and numb, but still she fights back, she screams and shakes—because she may feel weak right now, but she is older and stronger and it is her _duty_ to protect the others—and in front of her something flares, bright white and pulsing with energy.

Every glass on the table shatters, the table creaks, a couple of the dark-robes’ masks break. Someone screams, maybe it was her.

When she can see again, there’s a crack in the floor, spread out from under her feet. There’s excited murmurs in the air above her, talk of _power_ and _Crests_, but all she cares about is the hand that lets go of her cousin, the relief on his face.

She drops to her knees. Everything blurs, and she’s suddenly so tired, but when the dark-robes hands pick at her, inspecting her hands and petting her hair, she doesn’t resist.

She’s changed something, she can feel it, but the rest of the rules remain the same. Don’t resist. Don’t cry. Don’t let them do to the others what can be done to her.

She may not know much about being a noble Ordelia, but this is what it means to be Lysithea.

—

Lysithea grows. Some of the other children die, some don’t. The dark-robes spend more time with her now—even more than the others, even more than before. She has become special to them—indispensible, even.

The word _Crest_ is heard above her ears often now, and they push her to recreate the bright light she called once. She tries. Occasionally, it works. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

She hurts all the time these days, because the dark-robes can’t leave well enough alone, and it has been a very, _very_ long time since she could feel her fingertips, but there are still other children alive. There are still others to make sure the dark-robes leave be, so she endures.

At first, they’d pushed the others harder along with her, particularly those who carried her blood—the first time that blood has really mattered, in this dark place—but then her little brother had died, her tiny sister, most of her cousins. The boy with the doe-eyes had been the first. He’d breathed his last in Lysithea’s arms, made numb and warm and at peace by the power in her hands—a new ability born from grief, another thing to hide from the dark-robes—and he’d gone still with a smile.

And yet still, she could taste the judgment of his older sister, the closest child to her age. It was like metal, sharp and biting. She’d saved him, but then she’d killed him all the same, in the end.

That was when she began to understand the secret of death.

Eventually, the dark-robes learned. Eventually, they turned most of their attention back to Lysithea. Time has turned her fingertips blue, and her heartbeat sluggish, but she’s alive, and still the strongest, so she follows the rules.

Don’t fight. Don’t show your pain. Protect the others. Always. Always.

She isn’t allowed to see her parents for a very long time, visits no longer a luxury afforded to them. Their faces fade in the back of her mind, and their voices blur. She clings to what’s left of her mother, blonde hair and light eyes.

Then, suddenly, she _is_ taken to see her parents—her mother, at least. The dark-robes bring her, up out of the black, with excited voices chattering amongst themselves, a hand heavy in hers, leading her along. They’re more gentle with her now, just a bit. She’s precious, and must be handled delicately.

A baby, they say. Her mother has had a baby. The dark-robes have been given another chance, another opportunity with a child who shares her lineage. They want to compare her to the child—wean the baby onto her own blood now, then switch to the bright, sticky sludge they give Lysithea later on. They have the ability to start even earlier than they did with her, the ability to make this baby even _stronger_.

Lysithea listens to them, and she does not let anything show on her face, and she does not stumble in her steps. Her hands and feet are ice, she implores her heart to be the same.

Her mother screams when she sees her. She scrambles across the room, ignoring the dark-robes and their masks and the ever present tickle of their eyes, and throws herself to her knees in front of Lysithea. Her mother pulls her into a hug, head buried in her hair, one hand curled in the short strands and the other around her back, whole frame shaking.

“Lysithea,” her mother sobs, uncertain and afraid, and Lysithea cautiously squeezes her mother back. The heat of her body burns Lysithea’s fingers where they touch.

Blonde hair and light eyes. Warm hands. Her mother smells like honey—she’d forgotten that part.

Her mother picks her up, cradles her like the infant she hasn’t been for a long time, and tucks their heads close together. She snarls like a wild animal when the dark-robes step closer, as if they might snatch Lysithea away at a moment’s notice—though, Lysithea supposes, they probably will.

Just this once, however, they let them be. Perhaps they understand Lysithea and her mother will both be more pliant, more willing to cooperate, if the dark-robes give them this.

Her mother crosses the room with her, imperiously ignoring the dark-robes, to a bassinet in the corner. It is wooden, laden with soft blankets and carved with a Crest on the headboard, and Lysithea wonders if she slept there, a long time ago.

As her mother walks, she presses her mouth to Lysithea’s ear, in the facsimile of an embrace. She whispers secrets to Lysithea—the things the dark-robes would never think to say.

The year is 1173, her mother tells her. It is Lysithea’s birthday two moons from now. She will be eight. Her full name is Lysithea von Ordelia, oldest child of her line. Her brother is named Wilheim, her sister is Ramona (But they’re dead, long dead, Lysithea is well aware—does her mother know the same?). This baby is her littlest brother. His name is Avon. Lysithea is his big sister.

His only sister.

They reach the bassinet, and Lysithea peers down in her mother’s arms. Avon is small, so small. His eyes are closed, sound asleep, but Lysithea wonders all the same if they share an eye color or not. She’s forgotten her own. It’s been a long time since she’s seen a mirror.

There are wisps of dark red hair on Avon’s head. Not like their mother’s soft blonde at all. Not like Lysithea either, she thinks, as her mother brushes her too-long bangs from her eyes. What few strands she can see are a dirty off-white. She’s watched them fade over time, what glimpses she can catch. The dark-robes keep her hair short. It’s easier to manage.

Lysithea carefully reaches out a hand, and her mother leans in closer. Avon’s cheek is warm against her fingertips, and he stirs, breath puffing out softly. She can feel his pulse, firm and alive, and more worryingly, she can feel his Crest. No wonder the dark-robes have taken such immediate interest in him.

Behind her, she can hear the dark-robes’ voices again, muttering amongst themselves as they speak of _experiments_ and _blood_ and _promise_. Her mother tenses as she holds Lysithea. She can no doubt hear them, too—she knows what will become of her son. The kind of short, painful life he will likely lead.

_Protect the others_, this is Lysithea’s code. She can’t protect Avon, not when he carries her blood, and not when he carries a Crest.

Her mother stifles a sob into Lysithea’s hair, and she sees her cast a furtive glance back to the dark-robes, watching them speak to one another, attention diverted away from Lysithea and her mother. One of her mother’s hands lets go of her, strays to a spare pillow at the base of Avon’s bassinet, and hesitates.

Lysithea thinks of her cousin with the doe-eyes. The way he’d drifted off, finally free. No more suffering.

Avon will suffer, of that Lysithea has no doubt. And, eventually, he will die. They all die.

He may survive some short time, because of his blood, and his Crest, but it will only be a delay. This Lysithea knows, because she has learned the way death tastes on her tongue, and the way it feels in her bones, and she knows its secret.

You can’t outrun it.

And if the dark-robes take him, he will know nothing but pain, the numbness and cold Lysithea has grown into, every day until death rescues him.

Her mother’s hand hovers over the pillow, fisting and unfisting anxiously. Her mother understands what needs to be done, but she’s too frightened, and they will not have much time.

“Mother,” Lysithea says quietly. It is the first word she has spoken in a long time, and the sound croaks and snaps in her throat. Her mother startles. “Mother, let me.”

Her mother stares down at her, wide-eyed, and Lysithea stares back, unflinching. Slowly, hesitantly, her mother lowers her into the bassinet with her brother. She fits easily. Lysithea may be the biggest among the other children, but she is still small enough for this.

She takes the pillow without pause, fitting it between her hands. She can do this for her mother—her mother, who cannot bear to watch another of her children turned into a monster or reduced to a lifeless husk, but is also too fragile to cut short their suffering herself. Her mother, who has warm hands and honey-blonde hair. Lysithea is not like her. She has white in her hair and ice in her heart, and her fingers feel nothing when she fits the pillow over Avon’s face.

She does not pray for his soul, or for his peace. She does not yet know that there is a goddess to pray _to_. She only hopes, fervently, that he will not struggle. It will alert the dark-robes, and then there will be nothing she can do to save him.

With everything she has in her, she holds the pillow steady, and she calls her magic alongside it, wishing her brother quiet, and still.

Avon, still asleep, squirms just slightly, and Lysithea envelops him in her magic, smothering any cry that might escape with feather-down and with the power the dark-robes have cursed her with. Her brother twitches once, twice, and then goes still. She keeps the pillow firmly on his face regardless. His heartbeat hasn’t given up yet—she can still feel it, same as she can his Crest.

Eventually, it slows, even slower than her own, and then stops. She takes off the pillow, and sits back, and her mother sobs—in relief, or in horror, Lysithea doesn’t know—and collapses to her knees in front of the bassinet. The dark-robes startle, and cry out, running across the room. They yank Lysithea off of her brother, pulling her away as some of them try frantically to revive him, and Lysithea watches them with impassive eyes.

They can’t do anything. She used the power they gave her to make sure Avon will never wake again, and like the fools they are, they’ve made her so much stronger than they are in this regard. For all their experiments, she understands death much more intimately than they ever can.

In this moment, watching her screaming, crying mother be dragged away from the corpse of her youngest brother, as other dark-robes hold her apart from them both and frantically ask her what she has done, Lysithea adds one last rule to the list.

Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Don’t resist. Protect the others.

Free her parents.

They have lost all of their children but Lysithea, and she is not as they made her. The dark-robes have warped her—body and blood—and her parents deserve more than this pain and a daughter who is empty inside, who can suffocate innocence without hesitation.

They are still alive—still warm and bright. She can save them.

She must save them.

—

Lysithea is nine, and she understands that the kind of power she has was not meant for any mortal child. She can feel it singing in her veins, thrumming with her pulse, and is starting to learn how to call it at will. The dark-robes teach her magic, pushing the limits of the Crest power they gave her, and Lysithea exceeds their expectations each time.

They teach her of the nature of flames, and she calls blazing wildfires. They teach her of snow and frost, and she conjures them blizzards. She conquers the power of darkness, and learns to call blight and famine and catch them between her fingers. One day, they bring her a rabbit, small and pale and silken to the touch, and she finds its color ironic when she holds out a hand and her now snow-white hair flurries around her head as she calls a swarm, a pestilence with wings. It devours the rabbit whole, white bones left behind, and she thinks her skin might be almost as pale as she picks up a leg bone, studying it.

A part of her wails inside, but she does not shake, and she does not cry, and she does not throw up, no matter how much her throat burns—and she’s not sure if that pain is from her Crest, or from the tiny piece of her still capable of horror, but it matters very little.

The next day, the dark-robes inject her with a new sludge, a deep red, and she bites back a single whimper that wants to escape as a scream as her body twitches and she learns how to open a black hole above her head. It sucks and sucks, drawing everything in, and she almost wishes it would consume her, too.

Almost—but she is needed here. Other children still live, if not many. Her oldest cousin. The cook’s two youngest. She must keep them safe.

She must keep the dark-robes' eyes on her. Not that it’s hard.

She is nine, and the dark-robes are quite sure. She has two Crests.

The first is easier to call to her. It flares brighter, stronger. She’s learned its shape, memorized it—she’s not quite sure what it means, but based on what the dark robes say, she knows it means _something_. One day, she’ll understand it.

_Major Crest_, they tell her, pleased when she calls it forth for them on demand. When she uses it to make her magic so strong the walls shake, and her body trembles to hold in all that _power_.

_The Major Crest of Gloucester_, another says, and she files that away. Perhaps her mother would know what that means, if she asked, but she can’t. She has not been allowed to see her mother since Avon. The dark-robes blame her mother, and they are still punishing her, using her daughter’s absence as the only thing they can still take away.

She has seen her father once in that time. He’d held her hands in his, trying to warm up her stiff fingers. He’d whispered he didn’t blame her for Avon, not in the slightest, but all Lysithea had been able to do was stare at the red of her father’s hair, and remember. Despite how fervent her father’s words were, she wasn’t sure if she could believe him.

Her second Crest is not as easy to call as the first. She is told that is because it is a Minor Crest, the Minor Crest of Charon, and those are less powerful, more difficult to activate. Still, the dark-robes push her to master it, to learn to call it as easily as her Major Crest.

She tries.

She measures time in the magic she learns, in the burn of the dark-robes’ Crest mixtures in her veins, and in death. She is the dark-robes’ greatest success, but they still wonder if they can’t do better, and they still make use of all the test subjects available to them.

Two major Crests, they agree over her head, over her cousin’s head as they drag her away, over the heads of the cook’s children as they cower, would be better. Lysithea has successfully taken on a second Crest, and all the others now host one. Perhaps there is room yet for more success.

Lysithea explores the intricacies of her Crest of Charon. She learns how to use it to master storms, to turn her frame into a lightning rod and bring thunder and wind to heel under her command. The dark-robes attempt to give her cousin a second Crest. The girl flares bright, then fades, and then she dies slowly, with Lysithea using her magic to bring enough snow into her palm to cool her cousin’s overheated forehead as she burns up. The fever ravishes her body, too much even for the ice of Lysithea’s touch to conquer, until finally she slips away.

The dark-robes task Lysithea with learning to use her two Crests in tandem, and under their watchful eyes she pushes her body to the limit, trying and failing to carry the crackle and howl of Charon’s storm in one hand, and the current of Gloucester’s gravitational pull in the other. Despite all her rules, the mere attempt brings her to her knees every time, and while she does not—_will_ not—scream, the dark-robes still seethe in disappointment.

They attempt to give the cook’s daughter a second Crest. She develops the chills, body shaking every night, and Lysithea can do nothing, unable to bring warmth to her frozen, frost-stained fingers, when her own body is slowly collapsing under the strain of thunder and black holes struggling to coexist inside her. The cook’s daughter dies, lips blue and eyes glassy, and the girl’s brother buries his face in Lysithea’s shoulder and howls his grief, the air around them crackling with the promise of tar and decay gifted to the boy by his stolen Crest of Gautier.

Then it’s just the two of them—the last, the strongest, the only ones who could survive the toll the Major Crests take on their body—and despite her best efforts, Lysithea learns the boy’s name.

He is Francis, and she is Lysithea, and they are not siblings—in another life, they would be servant and master—but they sleep curled next to each other all the same. He hugs her hands to his chest, trying to breathe life back into them, and she counts his heartbeat under her palms, wills him to survive. Charon rages, and Gloucester pulls, and Gautier bubbles and boils, and Lysithea sometimes wonders if between the two of them, they might have the power to tear this entire place down, if only they weren’t both too afraid to try.

Lysithea knows they’re stronger now—stronger than any individual dark-robe will ever be. But this world of fear, pain, and obedience is all they’ve ever known, and they are small, and they are outnumbered, and their parents are hostages in everything but name.

She wants to save Francis. She wants to save her parents. She does not know if she can have both.

Lysithea turns ten—she thinks she does, maybe, _maybe_—and the dark robes succeed in giving Francis a second Crest: a minor Crest of Cethleann. They seem frustrated he did not pick up a Major Crest, but pleased he managed a second one all the same, and he becomes as much a subject of their study as Lysithea does.

But the strain of the second Crest is too much for Francis, and when the dark-robes press him to learn to use it, it begins to pull his body apart, like the first rip of a seam slowly splitting a bag open entirely. The Crests struggle for dominance in Francis’s body, slowly destroying him, as Lysithea watches.

Like her siblings, like her doe-eyed cousin, like all the other children, she can do nothing to save him—only hold him in her arms, soothe his fever and his pain with her magic, and hope to some higher power she doesn’t believe in that it will at least end quickly.

It doesn’t.

Francis’s Crest of Cethleann—built for a healer or nurse, someone with kind hands and a peaceful smile—keeps trying to save him, repair his body even as its power combined with Gautier destroys him from the inside out. Lysithea can feel it, can trace the Crest at it lights up under his skin. It frantically keeps his heart beating, his blood pumping, as his other organs slowly give out. It takes days, and every night as Lysithea watches, Francis’s head in her lap, she thinks of Avon in his bassinet, and realizes this may be the one thing that can haunt her more.

“Lysithea,” he says to her on the final night, breath shallow and eyes glazed. “Lysithea, please.” She smooths a hand over his forehead, and begs her heart of ice to feel nothing, show nothing. He does not need to see fear on her face as he dies. “Please, make it stop.”

“I can’t,” she admits quietly, her rarely-used voice raw.

“Like you did for the others. Please.”

Hesitantly, she nods, and calls her magic to her, her gift born from death—the only kind of healing she knows how to offer. She wills him silent, and warm, and still, peaceful for his final moments, and Cethleann screams back against her, fighting to save its host. The numbness in her fingers crawls up her hands, biting at her wrists, and she hisses.

“I _can’t_,” she says, and the edge of a sob catches in her throat. “It won’t let me.”

“Then don’t heal me.” Francis’s eyes search her face, and she tries to remember how old he is. Her age? Younger? They’re the same size, but it means little. Ever since she learned to tame Charon, she’s stopped growing. Her Crests take up all the energy her body can offer, none left for anything else. “Just end it. Any way you can.”

A pillow, she thinks. Right now she’d give anything for a pillow. Something she could use to make it quiet, and gentle, like she had for Avon. But the dark-robes had learned their lesson with her brother—had figured out what her heart of ice is capable of. There have not been pillows here for years.

“Please,” Francis begs her one last time, and Lysithea swallows down her hesitance, her horror. She counts the rules back to herself. Be still. Be quiet. Be obedient. Protect the others.

There is only one thing left to do for him.

She grits her teeth, and calls Gloucester to her. Charon is too violent, too rough-edged. She needs the finesse of control here. Francis smiles, so much relief written on his face, and something like affection. Lysithea does not shake, and she does not cry, and she does not close her eyes. He deserves this much.

Darkness whispers to her, singing its sorrow as it has to her for years—just as the figures and shadows that have haunted her dreams all this time have, as well—and she forms it in her palms, shaping it into a shard. She drives it through Francis’s heart.

Francis chokes quietly, blood bubbling out of his mouth, and seeping from his chest onto Lysithea’s hands. Its heat burns, prickling against her dead fingertips, and as the first drops of blood hit the ground, Francis goes still.

The darkness dissolves, leaving an empty wound behind, and beneath her palms Lysithea can feel Gautier and Cethleann fade as they die with their host.

And then there is nothing.

She is the only one left, and that somehow makes the room colder—too cold for a living being. Perhaps it is just as well Lysithea has rivers of frost under her skin, and has always been more dead than not. It might be the only reason any piece of her has survived.

Her limbs are sluggish and numb, and her lips are blue, and her hair is white—a perfect mirror of Francis’s own when she dips her head low, forehead resting tiredly against his. He looks more like someone who could be her brother than any of her siblings, marked in bright reds and soft blondes, ever did.

She wills herself to feel nothing. She steels her face, and curls her hands into fists, and counts back the rules. Scratches the last one off the list. Counts them again.

And then, for the first time in a very long, long while, Lysithea cries.

—

The dark-robes who come the morning after Francis dies do not startle at the scene before them when they arrive to collect her. They stare, gazes impassive behind their masks, and Lysithea stares back blankly from where her head rests on Francis’s chest, white hair stained red on the side pressed against him.

One of them goes to her, yanks her off of Francis, and smacks her hard across the face. A punishment for crossing a line that was not hers to breach: the only things that had been allowed to take Francis to death’s waiting arms had been time or the dark-robes themselves. Unlike with Avon, they do not ask her what has happened, and she does not attempt to explain herself. It would be a waste of words on both ends.

A boy is dead, but it changes almost nothing about the dark-robes’ plans. All that differs is one stays behind to remove Francis’s body, and another takes her to wash her hair before the day’s scheduled events.

After her hair is clean, still dripping water onto stone, she’s brought before the dark-robes in the room they’ve tested and tortured her in for years. She does as she’s told, as she always has. She follows the rules. She sits still as they pour their poison into her body—still seeking, it seems, to give her even more Crest power than she already carries—and she does not cry, and she does not speak. She runs through the warm-ups silently, and perfectly. She lets them measure her, weigh her, manhandle her.

Then, as always, they ask her to use both her Crests at once. They watch her closely, waiting expectantly. Every time before this, Lysithea has made her best attempt. Every time, she has given them all she has, and followed the rules, and pushed her body to the breaking point, in order to keep their attention on her.

Only now, she realizes, there is no one else to deflect their gaze away from. There is no one to protect, no one to save. Everyone is dead. The only people left are her parents, whom she has not seen in years—and who, she realizes, if things continue as they are, she may never see again.

Everything Lysithea has known since she was aware of her existence is meaningless now, the last fragments left behind with Francis’s corpse. The _rules_ are meaningless now.

Be still. Be quiet. Do not let your face betray you. Do not fight back.

For what?

“Child,” one of the dark-robes says firmly, calling her back to the task at hand. Not her name, never her name. “Your Crests.”

Almost without her permission, Lysithea feels her head nod. Her mind is stuck somewhere else, caught up in the tangled fractures of the rules that she built her life around.

She is stronger, she knows. She has been stronger for a very long time. They made her that way.

All that has kept her back is the rules, and her fear. Her belief that she must be the shield between the dark-robes and the others, until her last breath.

Lysithea is a dead girl walking, cold to the touch and numb inside and out. Her heart is ice, and her blood is poison, and she does not feel enough—not enough to be human, not in the slightest—but for this moment she does _feel_, she feels so much it eats through her body, and speeds the sluggish beat of her pulse.

Hatred. Anger. It tastes like feather-down and cotton, like honey and sweet rot.

“_Child_,” the dark-robe reminds her again, and automatically, she lifts her hands in front of her.

She calls Gloucester with one—pull and power, darkness and despair. The sheer force of it is her oldest friend, and though it chills her, she welcomes it as it surges under her skin.

And then she puts it aside, and turns to Charon. This has always been the struggle—her more troublesome, if less powerful, Crest: the storm that doesn’t want to be conquered. But this time, she seeks not to tame it. She reaches out to the lightning buried in her bones, blows wind into it with her rage, and the maelstrom shapes in her mind’s eye as the Crest responds to what it knows best. Fury, and thunder.

Charon lights up in her other hand, Gloucester still pulsing in time with it, and in front of her the dark-robes light up, murmuring around themselves as the record keepers scribble notes.

One goes to give Lysithea her next instructions, but she cannot hear him over the storm around her, in her. The crackle of Charon and the tide of Gloucester, pulling her along, urging her forward.

She thinks of Avon. Francis. Wilheim and Ramona. The doe-eyed boy. The cook’s daughter. Her oldest cousin. All the others, whose names are long lost, but whose faces never left her.

Lysithea screams, pulling her hands back to her chest and forcing Gloucester and Charon together, and around her she feels the world implode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started playing Fire Emblem Three Houses about a month ago, at a really interesting time in my life. I’d just moved, and was beginning grad school at the ripe old age of 20. Beginning grad school this young, and at a fairly prestigious school, has been…hard. I often feel feel like I’m living a lie—constantly trying to prove to both others and myself I’m good enough to be here, trying to hide my age (a fun thing when all most grad students want to do is go to bars), and trying to stop myself from having a breakdown ever since I arrived in New York, because if I admit I’m not keeping it together, it’s admitting I’m too young for this. It’s difficult, and has definitely affected my ability to make good use of my time and actually write (which is hilarious given that’s what I’m at grad school for). My anxiety stopped my ability to work on my fics in my tracks, and even kept me off Tumblr. For a while, it’s felt like all I could manage was game. 
> 
> Lysithea wasn’t the character I would have picked as my favorite when I first started playing Three Houses, but she hit home in a really undeniable way. In her not only did I see where and who I am right now, as someone desperately trying to affirm my right to be where I am, even to myself, but I also saw the ghost of my 16 year old self, when I’d chucked myself into community college and hoped for the best as I desperately tried to prove I deserved more than to be treated like a child in front of men and women 2-4 years my senior. 
> 
> Lysithea says she doesn’t have time for failure, and I know something about that. Particularly with my health issues, my fuck-all inferiority complex, and my constant belief that I’m running out of time. I haven’t been through half of what she has, not remotely, but I identify with her all the same. I guess I just know what it’s like to be the youngest person in a room, and know you’re one of the smartest people there, but still feel like every word out of your mouth and every action of yours jeopardizes your standing with the people that, despite your age, have become your peers. 
> 
> Lysithea has an incredibly tragic story behind her, worthy of a main character’s, and what can I say? I’ve always been a sucker for the one canon didn’t pay enough attention to—and a sucker for expanding on the horrors of life that built them, and broke them.
> 
> So this is my love letter to her and what she’s done for me, I guess. Maybe a bit of a weird love letter, but one all the same. 
> 
> (P.s. No, I don’t have any idea how she ended up with Lorenz, either. That just kind of happened, both in my playthrough of the game, and in this fic.)
> 
> Tumblr: [pastel-clark.tumblr.com](http://www.pastel-clark.tumblr.com)
> 
> Twitter: [twitter.com/Pastel_Clark](http://www.twitter.com/Pastel_Clark)


	2. The Ghost Among the Ruins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For as long as she can remember, the dark-robes have always been here. She has never been able to escape them. It hardly seems possible now.
> 
> Her parents seem to be struggling to believe it themselves, but still they swear it to her. The dark-robes truly are abandoning the ruins of House Ordelia.  

> 
> _Why_, she demands to know, over and over again. _Why_ are they leaving? Why now?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this chapter basically about Lysithea trying to cope with trauma and deciding she hates Lorenz's dad? *checks notes* uh yep it appears so. 
> 
> Excuse my revised chapter count haha...
> 
> (Thank you, though, to everyone who left such lovely comments on the first chapter. I'm sometimes a slow replier, but your words absolutely meant the world to me and gave me the confidence to continue this fic knowing people genuinely are interested in it.)
> 
> **Trigger Warnings:**
> 
> -Singular reference to suicide
> 
> -Vague self-harm stuff

She wakes in a bed, soft and plush, with a feather pillow beneath her head.

This is, she thinks, the first thing that isn’t right. The second comes when she opens her eyes, and she sees honey blonde framing a teary countenance.

“Lysithea,” her mother sobs, and all Lysithea can do is stare, and blink slowly.

“Mother…?” she asks softly, more confused than anything else, and her mother sniffles loudly, wiping at her cheeks. Behind her mother, Lysithea can see the faintest glimpse of a head of dark red, now catching grey along the temples. Her father? “What…”

“Don’t try to speak too much,” her mother tells her, smoothing the hair back from her forehead. “You shouldn’t put any unnecessary strain on your body. They said it could…” Her mother’s eyes stray to her father, uncertain.

“Lysithea,” her father says solemnly. “We need to talk to you.”

Despite her parent’s protests, Lysithea sits up, wincing at the strain in her arms. Her muscles scream, and she finds herself short of breath halfway through the action. Her mother flutters around her, arranging pillows against her back and touching lightly at her arms, as if wanting to assist her but fearful Lysithea will shatter at the slightest pressure. At last, Lysithea is propped upright, able to face her parents. They look somewhat relieved, and Lysithea pointedly does not let her face betray the tight pain in her chest, or the shaking of her hands as she slips them under the blanket.

Something is wrong. Something is wrong with her body. Is it finally time? Has it finally given out on her, as all the other children’s bodies had?

She takes stock of it all, counting the sluggish, slow beat of her heart. She manages to flex her fingers, pushing past the numbness, and though her limbs ache, they respond to her commands. She cannot feel her toes. She can see, and she can hear, but when she breathes in the air, her sense of smell is entirely dead.

And, as always, her Crests sing underneath her skin.

“Lysithea…” her mother says once more, for no apparent reason in particular, and the grief in her voice is a terrifying thing.

Lysithea flits her eyes around the room. Instead of the assemblies of dark-robes she is used to, only one stands in the room, guarding the door. Though the dark-robe’s head does not turn, and she cannot see their eyes behind their mask, she feels the weight of their gaze all the same.

She remembers—Charon’s rage in one hand, Gloucester’s sorrow in another, and the world around her coming to ruin by her design—but after that, nothing.

“What happened?” she asks as quietly as possible, hands fisting in her lap. “What did I do?”

Her mother bursts into renewed tears, and her father’s mouth forms a thin, grim line, and Lysithea feels like she might already half-know the answer.

—

The dark-robes are leaving.

This is the first thing Lysithea’s father explains to her as her parents crouch by her bedside, hands reaching out, seeking her own as she keeps them firmly buried beneath her blankets. She doesn’t know what to do with this: all this…affection. All this touch, from these people who are meant to be her world, but are more strangers to her than anything else, after all these years.

All this time, she’s clung to the faint details of them she could remember, but now that they’re in front of her, she can’t make sense of people bigger than her who are not trying to cause her pain—or why, or _how_, they’re even here.

She can’t make sense of their words, either. For as long as she can remember, the dark-robes have always been here. She has never been able to escape them. It hardly seems possible now.

Her parents seem to be struggling to believe it themselves, but still they swear it to her. The dark-robes truly are abandoning the ruins of House Ordelia.

_Why_, she demands to know, over and over again. _Why_ are they leaving? Why now?

Slowly, she gets it out of them, in bits and pieces. All the missing gaps.

It goes like this:

When Lysithea finally did what they asked of her—finally succeeded in using Gloucester and Charon as one—she brought it all to the dark-robes: the fire and the frost, the plague and pestilence. She brought the roof down on their heads. Literally. The south corner of their manor is nothing more than a pile of rubble, now. Her childhood, her personal hell, destroyed.

She killed ten of the dark-robes. Her parents aren’t the ones to give her the number, perhaps thinking it’ll affect her too greatly. They don’t understand. Her heart is numb, and the dark-robes are not people. Not to her.

She’ll work out the number later herself. It is a balm on her soul.

Her parents had thought her dead, too, at first. They and the servants, for once working in tandem with the remaining dark-robes, had dug through the carnage, looking for her body.

And they’d found her. Not only alive, but completely unharmed, if unconscious.

That was, they tell her, nearly a month ago.

The deaths of the dark-robes had no longer mattered, then. The remaining ones had ushered her parents away, stolen Lysithea back from their arms, and sequestered her in a spare room in the manor. They’d called in reinforcements, and replacements for all their destroyed equipment, and gotten to work running their tests, studying her blood and body.

The experiment was a success. She’d accomplished what they wanted—the power of two Crests in one body, each mastered, and used in tandem.

The experiment was a success, until it wasn’t.

The trouble came when Lysithea wouldn’t wake up, her mother explains, eyes finally dry but cheeks marred with stains, and a tremble in her thin shoulders. Even though there was no outward sign of any injury, she would not wake. Healing magic was needed just to sustain her as the days wore on and she did not regain consciousness to consume any sustenance on her own.

That was when the dark-robes had started to wonder, for the first time, about the internal state of her body. About what becomes of a child who takes on two Crests, and manages to survive, but comes away with a weak pulse, and chilled skin, and stunted growth.

Lysithea survived their experiments—she is the _only_ one who survived—but she did not, it seems, come away unscathed.

Her heart of ice has come with a cost, after all.

Her parents don’t exactly spell it out, trying to veer away from details as much as possible, but Lysithea can read between the lines.

A part of her has always known. She’s more dead than alive. The only difference is that the dark-robes know now, too. Her body is giving out. Slowly, but steadily.

The experiment was a failure.

_She_ is a failure.

—

It all happens so quickly—almost _too_ quickly. The dark-robes have no interest in prolonging matters, now that they know there is nothing left here of value for them. They make their last records of Lysithea’s condition, they pack up their materials—both new and salvaged from the destruction she reaped upon them—and they…they leave. All at once, like it is nothing at all to them.

Perhaps it is.

Lysithea is powerless as she watches it happen, confined to her bed by her parents’ firm commands. They’re still worried that if she exerts herself, she may collapse again, and this time never wake up. Their vigilant gazes rest on her almost all the time, and the feel of their eyes makes her skin itch, then burn. She is not used to being so visibly watched, or so constantly cared for. She is used to masks—both the dark-robes’ and her own. She doesn’t know how to handle her mother asking her every couple hours if she’s all right, when she’s still struggling to even get used to seeing her mother every day.

_Yes,_ she promises her mother. Yes, she’s okay. Yes, she feels better each day. Yes, she’s sure she is in no pain.

All lies, but the truth has never been one of Lysithea’s rules—and only one of those rules matters anymore, anyway. Protect her parents, in whatever ways she can.

So, she keeps her own careful eyes on the dark-robes as they pass her by, and as they leave House Ordelia as shrinking figures from the window view next to her bed.

The dark-robes say nothing on the subject as they leave, but it is understood by herself and her parents, and all the leftover members of the household, that all this is something they must never speak of. If and when the world outside—this world she knows of only in the vaguest of terms, that she still struggles to picture—peers into House Ordelia, they will find nothing out of the ordinary: the eccentric, reclusive count, his sensitive wife, his young, fragile daughter. Nothing more.

The horrors of her childhood, every fact and rule she has lived her years by, must now be swept under a rug. To do anything otherwise will no doubt jeopardize the newfound freedom they’re being granted, and bring the dark-robes back to wipe out what’s left of their family. Knowing that the truth of all the death this house has seen must be buried burns Lysithea, biting at her fingertips and choking her, but she is no fool.

The dead can’t be saved, and vengeance is a lie people with power and nothing to lose write for themselves. She might admit that she half-attempted it, but the effort nearly killed her. It nearly cost her parents the only thing they have left.

The living are what matters. She must protect her parents. She must survive, and she must be silent, and she must not scream, and she must not cry.

It will be easy, she tells herself as the last of the dark-robes vanish where the sky meets the horizon on the way back to the Empire. These are things she has been doing her whole life.

—

Most of the staff—anyone with anything to return to or anywhere to go—leave, no longer held hostage by the seclusion the dark-robes had demanded of all of them. Many of them had children once. Not anymore. Lysithea can hardly blame them for wanting to flee from those memories.

The only ones who stay are the people who must, and those with nothing else left. Her parents. Her widowed aunt, left behind by Lysithea’s uncle, who threw himself from the balcony when the dark-robes told him his last child had died. A couple of the servants, whose families have served House Ordelia for centuries, and who could not imagine another life. A single knight, who cannot seem to escape the ghost of the son he never got to bury.

Francis’s mother, the cook—she stays too. Lysithea struggles to look her in the eye, when she brings her meals.

“Most of the others left,” she says to the cook one day, almost against her will, as she watches a few last servants, the final stragglers, hitch a wagon with their belongings. “Don’t you want to?”

The cook does not hesitate as she sets down the tray with Lysithea’s dinner, her mouth a firm line as she wipes her hands on her apron.

“My whole family died here, Miss Lysithea,” she says, none to gently, and in this one sentence Lysithea decides she likes her. She isn’t trying to sugarcoat things for her, not like her parents. “And it’s been the better part of a decade since I’ve spoken to any of the rest of my relatives. I wouldn’t have any idea where to start.”

Lysithea turns her head from the window, and when she cannot bring herself to look at the cook’s face, she studies the woman’s hands. They’re wrinkled, and there’s the faint impression of where a wedding ring once was, but they still look sturdy, and strong.

This is the woman who bore Francis, just as Lysithea’s mother bore her. But this woman does not know her son, not like Lysithea did. She did not hold him in her arms as he breathed his last. She did not call upon the mercy of darkness and bring it into his heart.

Lysithea, with her cold hands, her numb fingertips, her blue-stained nails, she did that. Her mother thinks her hands delicate—because her mother does not understand her, either.

“Isn’t it difficult for you to be here?” she asks.

“Yes,” the cook says without pause. “But I imagine it’s hard for your family, too. And someone has to stay behind. If we all run away, where does that get us?”

—

The first outsider her parents bring to the manor is a doctor, a real one. Lysithea watches him arrive from her seat on the windowsill. She’s still more confined to her bed than not, but her parents at least let her walk around some, now. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Windows, at least, were a luxury she never had before. They make the passage of the days, as her body struggles to piece itself back together, less monotonous.

The doctor is an old man, stooped and with a cane in one hand and a large, black bag in the other. He was procured from a nearby town. She wonders what they say there about the reclusive House Ordelia—she wonders if he knows he is the first person from the outside world to step foot into their manor in more than eight years.

When he inspects her, Lysithea is careful to hold very, very still, and while he gives her a strange look for it, she thinks it better safe than sorry. He presses an instrument to her chest, listening to her heart, and a frown shapes his face. The more he moves the instrument around, the deeper the frown gets. He casts a few, unfamiliar spells on her, presumably meant for healing, and a crease between his brows joins the rest of his perturbed expression.

He asks if he might see a sample of her blood. Lysithea sticks out her wrist obediently. Her mother snatches it back moments later, and babbles something about Lysithea having a blood disorder. A condition.

The lines in the doctor’s face grow sharper.

He asks if he can speak to Lysithea alone, and her parents refuse. Staying a few steps away from her as the doctor checks her over seems difficult enough for them as it is.

The doctor hesitates, scribbles something on a piece of paper, and slips it into Lysithea’s lap when her parents aren’t looking the right way as he makes a show of inspecting the old scars on her legs. She stares down at it uncomprehendingly. She can pick out a few words, but that’s all. The dark-robes taught her plenty, but they were never particularly concerned with whether she or the others could read. An experiment doesn’t need to be literate.

The doctor stands back up, looking to her intently, and when she stares back blankly, something dark shudders over his face.

“How is your daughter’s education going, Count Ordelia?”

“Fine,” her father answers stiffly.

“She’s progressing at a normal rate, then? Mathematics? She can read?”

“She’s ten, of course she can read,” her father snaps quickly. Too quickly. The doctor casts her father an unreadable glance, and as he does so, Lysithea quietly crumples the note in her lap. She can hazard a guess at what it might say, now. The words the doctor cannot ask her out loud with her parents in the room.

He has good instincts. He’s just looking in the wrong direction. Her parents are not the ones who have done this to her.

“How is she?” her mother asks anxiously, interrupting the staring contest between the doctor and her father, and after a moment of hesitation, the doctor gestures towards the door.

“We should talk outside.”

When they leave, Lysithea sneaks to the door silently, pressing her ear to it.

“Your daughter is very sick,” she hears the doctor say. “I don’t understand how she’s gotten to this condition.”

“She has health issues…” her mother offers hesitantly. “Is it…can you reverse it?”

“At this point? No. I can do something for her pain, and to mitigate any worsening side effects, but I can’t do much else—especially when I can’t decipher what’s causing her issues. If I could take a look at her blood, maybe—”

“No,” her father says firmly, and the fear in his voice echoes in Lysithea’s bones. “Just…how long does she have?”

“With the way things are now…” The doctor trails off, and Lysithea can picture him gesturing helplessly. “Another ten years. Fifteen, maybe. Twenty if she’s _extremely_ lucky.”

“Fifteen years?” her father hisses, his words more despair than anger, and Lysithea feels something heavy and hollow settle low in her stomach.

“Count Ordelia…” the doctor says, solemn as the grave. “Your daughter barely has a pulse. Her bones are brittle, and most of her organs are in the state you’d expect from a woman in her middle age. Her body temperature is…if I hadn’t just seen her, I’d swear she wasn’t alive to begin with. Fifteen years is _generous_. I don’t see a world where she lives past thirty, with the state she’s in.”

Lysithea’s mother sobs, high and loud, and Lysithea wrenches herself away from the door, stumbling back to her bed. She hesitates when she reaches the soft mattress, the fluffy pillows, and instead she finds herself grabbing her scratchiest blanket, and curling up in a ball underneath the bed frame.

This—the darkness, the tight space, the ache of her bones from lying on a hard floor with little to no padding—this is familiar to her. This is safe.

Fifteen years—maybe only ten.

Lysithea is ten years old, and another ten is more time than she has ever known, but it still feels like it may not be _enough_. Not enough to save her parents—to build them a life outside of all they have lost and still stand to lose. Not enough to answer for her final rule, the only one that still has any meaning.

Not enough for all she has to do, at all.

—

Slowly, haltingly, life at House Ordelia pieces itself back together: not remotely as it once was—nothing can ever be as it was before the dark-robes came—but at least into some semblance of a functioning existence.

The doctor who inspected Lysithea is sent home, with payment in gold for his services and for his silence, and Lysithea’s parents speak briefly of retaining him permanently, until Lyisthea shows them the crumpled note the doctor had given her, and her parents resolve to look elsewhere for a doctor who, for the right amount of coin, will be less concerned with such questions.

The destroyed corner of their manor, and the remaining rooms the dark-robes had worked in, are abandoned—all entrances leading to those cursed and corrupted ruins boarded up by Lysithea’s father, their sole knight, and the remaining servants. They use tapestries and heavy furniture to cover up and better blockade these new walls—too nervous, it seems, to procure outside contractors to do the work for them. It is the work of weeks, and every time Lysithea attempts to assist, she is whisked away by her mother, who clutches her close and babbles on about Lyisthea not overworking herself. The warmth of her mother’s embrace, something Lysithea spent years longing for, now grates. She cannot stand the way they treat her, as if handling her like fine china will erase the monsters that lurk beneath her skin.

Her parents, realizing that Lysithea no longer fits the nursery she slept in before the dark-robes came all those years ago, and determined that the infirmary not remain her home, allow Lysithea her pick of the empty bedrooms. She wanders them slowly over a period of days, her mother’s nervous hand in hers, and she imagines them as they might have once been: who they might have belonged to, in another world.

In the room with wide, soft rugs, meant to cushion little knees, she imagines the boy with the doe-eyes, playing and laughing in a fashion she’d never known him to do. In the room with beautiful floral tapestries, and a metal-framed bed, she sees her oldest cousin, sleeping softly and at peace. In the room with purple curtains and an elegant white chair, her sister Ramona haunts her. In the room with the creaking floor and wooden rocking horse, there are the echoes of her brother Wilheim.

In a bare room with an empty crib, one Lysithea’s mother balks at and drags Lysithea from the moment they enter, Lysithea can hear Avon’s soft cries.

There is a small room in a dusty corner of their manor. It is not opulent, like some of the others, but it has a wide window filtering in soft light, and a seat at its base. The seat is bare, but Lysithea is sure she can borrow some cushions from Ramona’s room, if she desires them. The room has an even smaller dressing room attached to it, with a low shelf that bumps up against an old, no doubt long-abandoned dresser shoved haphazardly in the room. It creates a gap between the wall and the back of the dresser, with the bottom of the shelf making a roof. When Lysithea peers into this tiny, secret cavern, the cook’s daughter stares back. On her way back out from the dressing room, she sees Francis, back turned to her and fingers pressed against the windowpanes.

“This one,” she tells her mother, and her mother bites her lip.

“I think this is meant for servants, darling,” her mother says gently, and Lysithea wonders if there is any point to explaining to her mother that she already _knows._

“This one,” she just repeats more firmly, and her mother does not argue.

A bed is moved into her new room, along with a small, ornate dressing table Lysithea’s mother procures from somewhere, and Lysithea herself snags a couple blankets from her infirmary bed and a pillow each from the rooms that should have been her brother and sister’s. The treatments the doctor prescribed Lysithea for her pain and her nausea and to help her sleep through the night are arranged on the dressing table, the pillows and softer blanket on the window seat, and the more pitiful blanket finds its way into the dressing room.

Lysithea’s mother begs her to simply tell her of anything else she needs, anything she desires, and when Lysithea can’t find anything that comes to mind, her mother fills up her room with all the things she imagines a little girl should desire. Soft toys and trinkets, music boxes and jewelry, fine clothes and shoes. Lysithea does not know what to make of any of it. The toys, when she hugs them close, are not warm like the bodies of all the other children that she’d spent her childhood sleeping back to back with and curled up together on their sleeping mats. Her dead fingertips are too numb to successfully wind the keys of the music boxes or handle the intricate clasps of the jewelry. The beautiful, heavy clothes drag her down, suffocating in their differences from the loose shifts she was raised in, and she’s too used to a life of bare feet for anything else.

With each new gift her mother adds to her room, attempting to reclaim the baby girl she lost, Lysithea finds herself even more of a stranger in her own space. She takes each peace offering her mother presents with a smile she knows does not reach her eyes, and she reminds herself that her mission, her new purpose, is to give her parents as much of a semblance of the normal life they once had as possible.

When it all becomes too much, she sneaks to the kitchen—a ghost in white nightdresses and silent as a grave on her bare, lifeless toes—and the cook fixes her plain bread and butter, and does not expect her to communicate beyond nods as she fills the silence with the clink of the dishes as she washes them and her quiet whistling.

And so, House Ordelia washes away what it can of the dark-robes’ stain, and it continues on. Lysithea’s parents dare not seek out new servants, shuffling their remaining staff into the most necessary roles, and taking on the leftover chores themselves. Lyisthea’s father stumbles back into the life of a voting nobleman in the Leicester Alliance with the disappearance of his pale-skinned, darkly-clothed “representative” from the decision table, and shakily pens letters from his dusty office as his wife scrubs the hallways outside. Lysithea’s aunt is assigned piles of silverware to polish, in order to keep her from staring dead-eyed out windows when left to her own devices. The two servants dust clean the abandoned rooms meant to entertain, and make the beds, and wash the fine clothes Lysithea pretends to wear. The cook maintains her domain. The knight guards their gate and their doors, and keeps a close eye on Lysithea when her parents can’t.

Lysithea spends her days wondering _what_ she is meant to do with said days. She follows her mother from room to room, watching her clean, or sits in the spare chair in her father’s office and watches him work. She eats her meals when they are given to her, and tries to figure out what she likes when asked. She does not cause trouble, and she does not bother the servants. She is quiet, and collected, and reserved.

When there is nothing else, she scratches at her forearms with her blunt nails and pokes at her dead toes, attempting to feel _something_. She stays short of drawing blood, though she is never sure if that is from common sense or because she fears what else, what _other, _might seep out from under her skin.

On the good nights, she sleeps in her new, soft bed, letting the gentle touch of the moonlight from her window lull her to sleep. On the bad ones, she crawls into her hidden enclave in the dressing room and lets the hard floor, the unkind blanket, the distinct _lack_ of pillows, comfort her.

Consistently, constantly, she wonders—is this enough? Is this all there is left? Is this all she can give her parents?

She doesn’t know what else she’s supposed to do. She doesn’t know what it means to be a nobleman’s daughter.

—

A few months after the dark-robes depart, House Ordelia receives its first official visitor.

The carriage arrives without warning, and Lysithea watches it pull into their courtyard from her window with cautious eyes. Behind it, she can see their knight sprinting as fast as he can to catch up to their unexpected guest, and when a man dressed in fine clothes and with an artful tangle of purple hair descends from the carriage, he casts their knight a reprimanding look.

Haltingly, the front door opens, the maid peeking a head out and voicing a cautious question, and after some indecipherable words are exchanged, the maid opens the door wider, she and the knight gesturing the stranger inside.

As quickly as she can manage, Lysithea hops down from her window seat and makes for her door. She does not know who this man is, and anyone, any stranger from the outside world, is a potential threat. She cannot leave him alone with her parents.

When she makes it downstairs, she finds their knight hovering in the hallway connected to their entrance hall, and she runs to him.

“Miss Lysithea,” he says when he sees her, looking startled.

“Renard,” she says, and when she reaches him, he catches her gently in his arms, steadying her. She looks up at him imploringly. “What’s happening? Who is he?”

Renard offers her a smile she thinks is meant to be reassuring, but one that falters all the same. “Everything is fine, Miss Lysithea. It’s just one of the other Lords of the Alliance. He’s come for an audience with your father.”

Something tightens in Lysithea’s throat. A Lord. Lords are dangerous. Lords have power, and money, and the education and lack of respect needed to ask dangerous questions, and make dangerous demands. The last time her father answered the request of a Lord, it cost House Ordelia everything. It brought the dark-robes upon them. Lysithea knows. Cook told her all about it, on one of the quiet nights she sat in her kitchen. Cook does not attempt to hide their miserable history from Lysithea, and she does not placate her and feed her sweet excuses like her parents. Cook understands she is not a child to be coddled.

“You should return to bed, Miss Lysithea,” Renard says, attempting to do said coddling. “You’ll catch a chill.”

“I _am_ a chill,” Lysithea snaps unthinkingly, and shoves past him. Renard reaches out a hand, but does not attempt to stop her. Like her parents, he treats her like glass.

Silently, Lysithea slips through the doorway into the entrance hall, and sequesters herself behind the nearest piece of furniture, a large cabinet. Peering out around the corner, she sees the man with the purple hair standing tall as her father hobbles toward him, leaning heavily on his cane. There’s a thin, wary smile on her father’s face.

“Count Gloucester,” her father says hesitantly. “What an unexpected surprise.”

_Gloucester_. The name knocks Lysithea off kilter, and she has to grab onto the cabinet she’s leaning against for balance. In her veins, her Major Crest pulses and whispers, and when she reaches out, she can feel a quieter version echoing from the regal man before her. Their twin crests in such proximity feel like tides rippling against each other, and it’s…deeply uncomfortable. She’s amazed the apparent Count Gloucester can’t feel it too, but his eyes never once stray towards her hiding place.

Lysithea digs her fingers into her opposite elbow, using the bite of dull pain to right her mind. She’d always suspected her Crest belonged to other people in that distant outside world—people who were genuinely meant to have it—but she’d never imagined she’d ever meet one quite so soon.

Count Gloucester gives Lysithea’s father a polite smile in return, but there’s something calculating in his face. “Edmund, please. We’re all nobles here, Count Ordelia.”

Her father reaches as close as he is apparently willing to get to Count Gloucester, and comes to a stop. Lysithea can’t see his face, but she can read the lines of tension in his shoulders. “Well, you must call me Alfons, then.”

“Very well.” There’s a glimmer in Count Gloucester’s eyes, like he’s already won some indecipherable game. “Alfons.”

“As I was saying,” her father begins again. “This is an unexpected—though not unwelcome—” he quickly tacks on, and Lysithea wonders if Count Gloucester can taste the lie, “visit. Is there something I can do for you, Edmund?”

“This is more of a social call, to see if there is anything I can do for _you_,” Count Gloucester says. “I was so surprised to receive your letter announcing you’d be joining us at next month’s Roundtable—and equally surprised by the departure of House Ordelia’s regular representative earlier this year.”

“Ah…” Lysithea’s father pauses, then stumbles through the practiced lie. “Well, I supposed it was about time I make an appearance…”

“Certainly,” Count Gloucester agrees, voice syrup-sweet, and he gives a short laugh. “And, naturally, I wasn’t sorry to see that representative go. You _do_ get used to people after eight years, I suppose…but I never much cared for the man. I was never quite sure what your father was thinking, appointing him. My apologies, by the way, for his passing.”

Lysithea’s grandfather. He was Count Ordelia when the dark-robes came, and he paid for it with his head. He’s nothing more than a smudge in her memory—the faintest impression of whiskers and wise, grey eyes.

“Thank you.” Lysithea’s father bows his head. “It was a long time ago, now, of course, but it seems it began a spill of misfortune for my family—and for our region, with the financial repercussions that the Hrym incident had for us…” He coughs awkwardly. “With all that happened, perhaps I leaned a bit too heavily on my father’s representative, and…became a bit of a recluse.”

“Perhaps,” there’s something a bit smug in Count Gloucester’s voice, and for the first time in months Lysithea feels the violent song of her magic in her blood, begging her to turn this man’s Crest against him and let him suffocate in Gloucester’s darkness, its depths. She quiets the urge. Count Gloucester is unpleasant to her mind, certainly, but he has no idea what her father has been through—what they all have. His ignorance is an unfortunate necessity of their situation, not a death sentence.

“Still,” Lysithea’s father keeps his head ducked, not meeting Count Gloucester’s eyes—a subservient pose. “I know I…was negligent of my duties. If you’re truly willing to refresh me on what I should expect at the Roundtable, it would be deeply appreciated…”

“Of course,” Count Gloucester says quickly, graciously. “That’s what I’m here for, after all.”

Lysithea’s father nods, then hesitates for a long moment. “Would you care for some tea…?”

“That would be most appreciated.”

Her father turns, grip faltering unsteadily on his cane as he goes, and slowly, he leads Count Gloucester through the doorway into the dining hall, the two of them entirely missing Lysithea in her shadowed corner. Lysithea watches them go with narrowed eyes, tracing the lines of her father’s stooped, struggling figure, and Count Gloucester’s tall, proud one, and wonders if her father understands he is accepting a favor he may not have the means to return.

She has no doubt Count Gloucester understands as much.

She does not like him, this outsider who has come into their still fragile, carefully rebuilt house under the guise of a kindness. There’s something rotten in him—she can feel it, like a fungus under his skin—and not for the first time, Lysithea suspects that the Crest of Gloucester and its carriers really are black holes, feeding on everything around them. Destroying them.

She would know. She carries that awful pull inside her, too, after all. She’s just been taught a different way to make a weapon of it than this Count, with his slick smile and careful words.

…Yes, suffice to say, she does not like Count Gloucester at _all_.

She must keep an eye on him.

—

The most frustrating thing in the world, Lysithea is slowly realizing, is not being heard.

When she was with the dark-robes, silence was an absolute—a requirement of her survival. Lysithea was a body to be positioned as they liked, a weapon for their device. Her opinion did not matter—no, she did not _have_ an opinion. She will not give pretense to the idea that her thoughts and feelings were something the dark-robes ever considered.

And so Lysithea had never thought much on either subject—her feelings, or her lack of ability to voice them. All that had mattered was the rules. All that had mattered was protecting the others.

Now, she’s adrift without the structure she’d built her life around, and without purpose. She flits from room to room, from day to day, trying to figure out what to make of a life where she does not live by someone else’s demands and someone else’s schedule. A life where she doesn’t seem to live by anyone’s schedule at _all_—her parents, at least, do not seem concerned with such things.

The only thing left is to keep her parents safe, and find a way to rebuild their lives, but it is _very_ difficult to do that when they _don’t listen to her_.

For the first time in her life, Lysithea has found herself with the cautious gift of a voice, and yet when it comes to her parents—the only purpose she has left in this world, the only things she can dedicate herself to anymore—it seems she still lacks the words, or the presence, to make herself truly heard.

She understands this after the first time Count Gloucester has visited. She slips out of the shadows to her father’s side as he waves off the other Count’s departing carriage, and when her father sees her, he startles violently, bringing a reflexive hand to his chest.

“Seiros! Lysithea, you startled me! What are you doing out of bed?”

“I don’t like that man,” Lysithea says, ignoring her father’s question. It’s been months since the dark-robes left—she doesn’t need more healing time. And she’d heard what the doctor said, anyway. She’s not going to get better. She will always have her heart of ice. “I don’t trust him.”

Her father huffs. “Count Gloucester is part of the Alliance. He’s our ally.”

“House Hrym were our allies, too.”

Her father stills. “How did you hear about that?”

Lysithea shrugs.

“Lysithea…” her father pauses, and sighs slowly. “I won’t deny Count Gloucester likely has his own agenda, but it was a kindness on his part to pay us a visit, and I’ll certainly need his help to conduct myself appropriately at the Roundtables, going forward. There is…much I’ve missed out on.”

Count Gloucester’s carriage finally fades completely from view, and Lysithea feels a frown shape her face. For her father to be voicing his insecurities like this, when normally he avoids any such thing with her, must mean he really is worried.

She promised herself she would do all she could to help her parents, but she can’t with…she doesn’t _know_ if this is something she can help her father with—his place at the Roundtable, his duties as Count. She understands so little of it. It’s an alien world to her, even if she did think her father would accept her opinion, which she doubts.

Still, she tries to explain, regardless, stumbling over her words as she searches for language that can communicate her thoughts—language she’s quickly realizing she doesn’t have access to. After all those years of speaking so little, and almost always in deference, she’s not the most vocally adept person, even if her thoughts remain another matter.

That will have to change.

“His smile is kind, but…his eyes have…something else inside them. He wants something from you.”

Lysithea turns to her father, imploring him with her eyes to listen to her, but he doesn’t even look her way. His eyes are caught up in the horizon, something empty and sad in their gaze, yet equally resolute.

“Please go back to bed, Lysithea. I’m worried you’ll catch a cold.”

Inside her chest, Lysithea can feel her heart of ice _burn_.

“…Yes, Father.”

—

Count Gloucester keeps coming back, even after the initial Roundtable meeting, his visits staggered over a period of months. Lysithea’s parents seem to remain grateful for his help, but Lysithea cannot shake the chills he gives her.

When she expresses as much to Cook one quiet night, Cook purses her lips, and nods her head reluctantly. “I heard rumors about Count Gloucester, in the old days…Word gets around between the staffs of the noble houses when they share borders like this…” she trails off. Lysithea waits. “…He was always described as a very calculating person, and ambitious. A good ruler of his territory, yes, but a little too power-hungry, and a little too assured in his own beliefs.”

Lysithea glares down at her bowl of soup Cook has prepared for her. The taste of it isn’t particularly appealing to her, but it’s not bad—simple, a distinct, singular flavor, and she likes that—and Cook promised her once she finished it, she can have some of the berries that they’d just gotten in. She’s slowly discovering she has a penchant for sweet things.

“He sees a use for Father that benefits him.”

“Yes,” Cook admits quietly, tilting her head. “He probably does.”

Eight months into Count Gloucester’s visits with her father, Lysithea comes up in their conversations for the first time. She’s watching them take tea in their dining hall, peeking out from around the doorway, Count Gloucester’s back turned to her. When her name passes from the Count’s lips, her father stiffens, just imperceptibly, but Lysithea has no doubt the other man caught it.

“You know, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen your daughter on my visits here.”

“Lysithea is…shy,” her father says cautiously. “She prefers her own company, or her mother’s.”

“And you have just the one daughter? No sons?”

“Just Lysithea.”

Sons are generally more important than daughters. This is something Lysithea has learned about the outside world. It casts a subtle irony on the fact that the blood of her brothers is on her hands.

“Hmm,” Count Gloucester hums, and then pauses. “…Still, it can’t be good for her to spend so much time on her own. Noble children need to be socialized with one another—especially since, as your heir, she’ll need to be ready to deal with political matters in the future. Perhaps I’ll bring my son along sometime. He’d be only a few years older than her.”

Lysithea’s father looks conflicted about that, caught between his instinct to keep her isolated from the outside world and thus safe, and what Lysithea has to assume is a parental desire for her to have actual friends like any other child, but he only smiles stiffly, and says “That would be wonderful.”

Lysithea, however, can’t bring herself to be too concerned about the notion of Count Gloucester’s no-doubt equally unpleasant son. She’s much more caught up on something else the Count had said: _heir._

She’d never thought about it before—particularly with her still tenuous and developing understanding of how nobility works—but she is her father’s child: his only child. One day, his title will pass to her—should she live long enough, at least.

One day, she will be Countess Ordelia, and she will be expected to do all the things her father is struggling through, now: the letter writing, the travel, the negotiations, the subtle, manipulative politics.

If her father can barely manage it, after eight years under the dark-robes’ thumb, Lysithea can hardly imagine herself being up to the task. She’s a weapon, with deadened fingertips and stolen power in her veins, and she doesn’t know the first thing about being noble, let alone the heir to her House.

She knows nothing about this role the world will come to expect of her—and how can she expect to help her father, if she can’t even alleviate his workload as she is meant to?

The question haunts her long after Count Gloucester departs with a wry smile and a hearty clap on her father’s shoulder. It steals even her sleep from her, and that night she finds herself wandering the rooms of House Ordelia, candle in hand.

Shadows warp the walls under the light of her candle, and the shapes they form, along with the creaking of the old building, make her shiver. She can easily picture nightmares—the horrors of her childhood, the creatures that made a monster of her in turn—stalking these halls. And she doesn’t need her imagination’s help to conjure ghosts to haunt this place—she sees them all the time, already.

Eventually, her idle feet lead her to the library. She stops short when she enters it, breath caught in her chest at the sight of all the old books, all the knowledge of the outside world she cannot access. Her mother had been a voracious reader, once, as had her grandfather, and the breadth of their library is no small feat.

Here, these pages could whisper to her the secrets of the outside world—the things expected of her, the things she needs to learn to say and do to protect her parents, the ways to make herself heard—if she had the means to listen.

Right now, she doesn’t, but perhaps…perhaps she could learn. Perhaps it isn’t yet too late. This purposeless existence, this daily life with no goal or structure, is destroying her. This could finally give her something to occupy her time, and a way to make herself more ready to face the world beyond her home, as she one day must.

After all, it’s all very well for an experiment to be illiterate, but the daughter and heir of House Ordelia cannot be.

—

Education, of course, is a complicated business.

The most straightforward thing to do, Lysithea imagines, would be to ask her parents to enlist a tutor for her. She’s gleaned enough from Count Gloucester’s dull, bragging chatter about his son to know this is how noble children are generally instructed. A tutor, or several, to teach them everything they’d need to know—from sensible things like reading to, apparently, the art of tea-making.

Lysithea, frankly, could not be less interested in subjects like the latter.

She is coming into this world behind everyone else, and if she wants a hope in hell at catching up, she cannot afford to waste her time on unnecessary, frivolous tasks.

Regardless, Lysithea concludes as she retrieves books off the lower shelves of the library the next morning, a tutor is out of the question. That would require bringing an outsider into the house—and outsider who would have to be made aware of Lysithea’s…circumstances. Someone who could be trusted not to whisper to the outside world that Count Ordelia’s only child is illiterate and completely uneducated. And Lysithea does not trust anyone in that regard. After the initial scare with the first doctor Lysithea’s parents had brought into the house, it had taken an _age_ to acquire a doctor whom they felt was safe enough. In the end, her parents had written abroad to the Empire, procuring a doctor from the ruins of the Hrym region.

There was an irony in it that Lysithea couldn’t deny, but the logic had been solid. The people of the Ordelia region had enough misgivings and rumors about their House without bringing in a local doctor who might say who knows what to others, and to acquire a doctor on recommendation from another noble house of the Alliance would to be to give another House an ear to what goes on here, and the true state Lysithea and her parents are in. At least the Empire already knows their secrets—no doubt they’d learned as much from the dark-robes.

(Of course, no one had said as much believing Lysithea was in the room, but she is small, and knows how to remain quiet when called for. It is not hard to go unobserved, and doing so is the only way to ever figure out what’s really going on in her parents’ heads.)

The same logic applies to a tutor—perhaps even more so. It is one thing for the outside world to know Count Ordelia’s daughter is sickly. It is another thing altogether for others to know Lysithea is illiterate. Their house, and her father, is in a tenuous enough position in the eyes of the Alliance as it is. Lysithea may have never known much about the outside world until this point in her life, but in these months creeping around and listening outside her parent’s doors, she has figured out enough.

She likes to think, despite all that, if she asked, her parents would get her a tutor anyway. They do seem inclined to give her whatever her heart desires—so long as it doesn’t strain her compromised body. Would they…consider this a strain?

She supposes it doesn’t matter—she’s resolved to take the decision out of their hands, regardless.

Lysithea is a protector, and she will not burden her parents any further.

She doesn’t need any help. She can do this on her own.

—

When Lysithea spills her mountain of books onto the spare table in the kitchen, Cook barely flinches, but does raise an eyebrow. “What are you doing?”

“Needed somewhere quiet to work. My parents never look in here,” Lysithea explains bluntly, pulling the first book toward her and cracking open the first page. She squints down at the unfamiliar symbols as they swim before her eyes, and with a frustrated noise, she turns a page—which does not, unfortunately, help. Perhaps this will be more complicated than she thought.

Unbidden, as always, her mind creeps to the dark-robes. With the threat of pain, there was nothing Lysithea had not been able to put her mind to when they asked, and it had all been so instinctive. Magic is a part of her, strengthened by her stolen blood, and in being forced to learn to call and control her Crests, she’d learned equally how to make magic _hers_ in a way she cannot hope to put into words.

It was all so different from what she is attempting to do now—but she cannot give up when she has barely yet begun. Lysithea has conquered frost and famine, fire and thunder. She has survived sickness surrounding her and death cradled in her arms. She buried her past and all those she could not save in the rubble she brought down upon the dark-robes’ heads. She will not let something as trifling as words beat her now.

Resolutely, she turns another meaningless page.

She hears Cook sigh, and then a hand settles on the page in front of her. Lysithea frowns, and looks up to glare pointedly at Cook. “What?”

“Miss Lysithea,” Cook says patiently. “You don’t know how to read.”

“I’m going to learn,” Lysithea says, as stubborn and forceful as she can manage.

“And you expect to accomplish that just by staring at books?” A sad smile creeps across Cook’s face. “You’re a very smart girl, but it just doesn’t work that way. Why not ask your parents for a teacher?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lysithea scowls, looking away from Cook, and she can feel an embarrassed flush scrawl across her face. “Think. No one can know. No one can know I’m like this.”

For a long moment Cook says nothing, before she quietly pulls out a seat next to Lysithea, and sits down heavily. “Miss Lysithea,” she says softly. “Please look at me.” Lysithea continues to scowl, keeping her eyes averted, and there’s something infinitely painful in Cook’s voice when she says, again, “Please.”

Reluctantly, Lysithea meets Cook’s eyes, and finds a kind of deep sadness—one that reminds Lysithea of the emptiness in her own heart, and the lost, broken feeling she gets inside her when she sees one of her ghosts in all those abandoned rooms—lurking inside them.

“What happened here—the things that…made you what you are. You understand that’s not your fault, right?”

Lysithea almost wants to snap at Cook, to demand she not pity her or treat her like a child, but she swallows it down. Cook isn’t like that, isn’t like her parents. She is the one person, perhaps, who can really _see_ Lysithea: the blood on her hands, the ice in her veins, and the fact that she stopped being a person, stopped being a _child_, a long time ago.

“It’s not about fault,” she says steadily, holding Cook’s gaze. “This is just the way it is, right? The way things have to be.”

Cook’s eyes lower, something somber in her gaze, and Lysithea knows she understands.

“Very well,” she says. “Would you accept me as a teacher, then?”

Lysithea blinks slowly. “What?”

A rueful smile tugs at the corners of Cook’s lips. “I may be just a commoner, Miss, without the fancy education most Nobles expect—but you’re not most Nobles, and I can read and do basic arithmetic just fine. I could give you that much, at least. No outsiders needed.”

“I…” Lysithea stalls, unsure what to make of Cook’s proposal. “I don’t need help. I’m not stupid.”

“I know you’re not,” Cook says gently. “But you’re at a disadvantage from most children, Miss Lysithea. You need to be smart with your time, and this will be much faster if you let someone assist you. This will not be easy, not if you want to catch up to other Noble children.”

“I have to,” Lysithea says, thinking of Count Gloucester’s hand on her father’s shoulder, weighing heavy with all the debts he will one day demand payment for. “I can’t let any of them own me.”

_Protect your parents,_ her empty, frost-ridden heart reminds her. _That is the final rule. You must answer for it. _

She will never care for any of it: the politics and games, the tricks and traps. She has seen it bleed her father dry, and she will endeavor to rescue him from that burden, but she will never let it claim her. She has faced much worse monsters.

“Then let someone help, just this once,” Cook says. “Let me.”

Lysithea stares at Cook, reading the lines in this old woman’s face—her joys, her pains, all the things that left marks on her as they were stolen away—and finds herself at a loss. “…Why?”

_Don’t you know?_ she wants to say. _I have seen the way you look at me. I can see that you know what I am, the things I have done. _

“Because I can.”

“But _why__?_” Lysithea says hoarsely, and with the iron clasp of fear wrapped around her throat, everything aches. She can barely breathe. “What do you want from me?”

Everyone always wants something. The dark-robes wanted a weapon. Her parents want their daughter. Her father wants an ally. Count Gloucester wants a puppet.

Cook hesitates, and Lysithea curls her hands into fists, letting her nails bite into the skin of her palms and clinging to the dull sensation of pain—proof there is still some life left in these cursed hands of hers.

“…I will not ask you to avenge my children,” Cook says softly. “Because I do not believe that is the kind of burden one should ever place on a child—especially not another victim of these circumstances. You are the most innocent among us all of any mistakes that brought those…people to our doorstep. No one should ask anything of you about undoing damage you did not cause.” Lysithea opens her mouth to argue, because _innocent_ is a word that should never be applied to her, and she must atone for what she has done, in any way she can, but Cook holds up a hand to silence her. “I mean what I say. Never let anyone in this life convince you otherwise. But—“ She draws a deep breath. “If you intend to one day inherit your father’s power, inherit this house and his seat at the Roundtable, I will ask you this.” Cook holds out a hand, and Lysithea takes it, clasping it between her own. The warmth of life, Cook’s Crestless blood beneath her skin, sends a gentle tingle into Lysithea’s fingertips. “If you will lead this land, keep it safe. Never let that darkness back into this place that has seen far too much suffering.”

Oh. Lysithea feels something inside her still, relieved. This—what Cook wants from her—this is a promise she can keep.

“I swear it,” Lysithea says, fast and hushed and firm, and Cook smiles slightly, squeezes her hand. “What they did to us—never again. Never again. Not to my parents, not to you, not to any of us. Never again in Ordelia.”

Cook sniffles, just slightly, and the noise startles Lysithea into meeting her eyes. A stray tear runs down Cook’s cheek, and she swipes quickly and effectively at it, before reaching across the table to lay her spare hand on Lysithea’s cheek. Lysithea finds herself leaning into the touch. It’s nice.

She closes her eyes. She will accept this help, offered as it is by one of the few people she can trust and one of the few who know the darkness inside her. She will use it to push herself along to what she needs to be, if she hopes to survive the outside world.

And then she will never ask anything of anyone, ever again.

To be the dark-robes’ successful experiment required a certain type of strength, but her magic and her crests mean little right now. This will require a new type of strength, and Lysithea must give it her all.

(And yes, _yes_, she was the dark-robes failure as much as she was their success, but she will not fail this. She can’t. She must save her parents—and by the monster inside her that can bring Hellflame to her fingertips, or by her own sharp words to combat any who would whisper in her parents’ ears with cursed intent—it will be done. This is what it will mean to be the heir to House Ordelia.)

“Then I will help you, dear girl. We’ll make a noble out of you, yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Katie: so is Lysithea gonna meet Lorenz before the academy at all or--
> 
> Me, thinking about how Ordelia and Gloucester have adjoining territories and Lorenz's dad Sucks: oh my god Lysithea's probably wanted to kill Lorenz's dad since like age 11
> 
> Katie: what


End file.
